Corporate and institutional mail rooms typically maintain large staffs for handling the large volume of mail that must be processed daily. The type of mail processed by the typical corporate or institutional mail room includes internal mail, which originates within the organization and has a destination also within the organization, incoming mail, which comes into the organization from external sources, and outgoing mail, which originates within the organization and has a destination external to the organization. In the typical corporate or institutional mail room, 60% of the daily mail is internal, 35% is incoming, and 5% is outgoing. Mail processing systems for these installations must be capable of sorting the organization's internal and incoming mail into groups corresponding to internal mail stops as well as sorting the organization's outgoing mail. With a large, and continually growing, number of mail pieces being processed, it is becoming increasingly important to provide an efficient process to sort the mail pieces.
For installations where there is a very large flow of mail to be sorted, on the order of thousands of pieces a day or more, large, highly automated systems automatically scan mail pieces to determine their address and thereafter control an automatic sorting system to properly sort the mail pieces. Various automated sorting techniques, systems and methods for processing mail are known. These systems may use either highly sophisticated optical character recognition (OCR) technology to recognize the addresses placed on the envelopes, or may use relatively simple bar code scanners to scan bar code which has been prerecorded on each mail piece. In these systems, highly sophisticated OCR systems are used to scan printed or handwritten addresses from each mail piece and automatic sortation equipment is controlled in accordance with the scanned address to properly sort the mail pieces. The OCR/CS system often includes a bar-code printer for printing zip codes on envelopes in bar-code form on each mail piece so that each mail piece might be further sorted at local stations more efficiently. In general, one large sorting machine is used to sort the mail for delivery to various geographic locations. Typically, the mail pieces are sorted according to a sort scheme into numerous groups (e.g. a range of ZIP codes, ZIP code (5 digits), ZIP code (9 digits), etc.).
The volume of mail handled on a daily basis by carriers, as for example, the U.S. Postal Service, is such that automated handling and sorting equipment is employed whenever and wherever possible to facilitate the distribution of mail pieces. Such systems have been extremely effective in sorting large volume mail flows, but the traditional systems have limitations. Mail pieces include letters, flats, irregular parcel pieces, and mail pieces which are delivered by individual mail carriers. Although traditional OCR/CS systems are capable of sorting thousands of pieces of mail per hour, most are limited in that they are designed to work with mail pieces falling into a fairly narrow range of sizes and thicknesses. Furthermore, most of the systems incorporate older control electronics that limit the functionality and flexibility of the systems.